"It's like simultaneously running stairs in your own soul": Catching up with fitness

Wednesday 10/15/25

In first grade, the art class I was in must have fallen behind--or our teacher had fallen behind with what she wanted us to be doing--because we came in one Friday and it said "Ketchup Day" on the board, by which the teacher meant getting caught up. I'd imagine that confused some kids. But this entry will catch matters up with fitness related pursuits.

I have not ran circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument since September 30. I don't know how you can take this country seriously. Where else--in terms of first world countries--does a country's government shut down? Does that happen in France and Sweden?

This is more frustrating because I was doing just about as well as I'd ever done in the Monument through last month. No matter how many stairs I was running, I had no residual attrition in my legs at all. For instance, if you run a great quantity of stairs, you might have some discomfort the next day. Maybe it's minor, but you can often feel something.

That wasn't the case. Each day I was running stairs was like I'd had a few days off and was as fresh as at any time previous. I'll get back to that level again after the Monument opens again, but it was something I wanted to keep going without a break.

On September 17, I started both a new year and a new decade. My calendrical age is not the same as my physical age. It serves little purpose to speak to or reference the former. It doesn't apply here, save in the sense of how much calendrical time I have to do what I want to do and am trying to do with my work, this war I am in, and having my work have bearing on the world.

To start that year and decade properly, I ran twenty circuits of stairs in the Monument in one straight session (about two-and-a-half hours of stairs) for the fourth time in my life and and the third time this year (all since June). The rangers let me in twenty minutes early that day, and it was wonderful having the Monument to myself. Plus, I could sing the Grateful Dead's "Terrapin Station" as I did my circuits before anyone else came through the door.

Some rise, some fall, some climb...

I climb. And if you don't know the difference between rising and climbing, I'd humbly submit that you have a lot to learn, if you ever do.

That same week, I had days of twelve and thirteen circuits, and I believe the amount of circuits I ran that week--fifty-five--was the most I've ever done in a week in the Monument.

Then I had another great week to follow. By the end of September, I had ran 280 circuits of stairs in the Monument since July 31.

And it is on that number that I'm still stuck.

My buddy Rick the ranger retired at the end of September. He happened to be the person I gave the pdf to of the op-ed in the New York Daily News about my stair running at Bunker Hill, when I thanked him and asked him if he'd share it with the other rangers.

He's a kind man. Always gave me a fist bump when I came in and then again when I left. On his final day, he told me he really enjoyed getting to know me better and complimented my writing which he'd been reading. Made sure that I knew the new hours, which have been mooted, of course, that were going into effect in October.

So what have I been doing since? What do you think I've been doing? I've been sitting on my ass complaining about how I don't have stairs to run, swelling up like a puffer fish, and saying it's not my fault.

No. Come on.

I've been running stairs almost every day at City Hall. 5000 yesterday, 3000 each of the two days before, 5000 each of the two days before that. You get the idea.

Most of these days I'm also walking at least three miles and doing my 100 push-ups.

I take the City Hall stairs two at a time. I didn't used to. I've been doing it for a few months now though when I'm there.

It's not the same. With Monument stairs, you feel a sense of achievement. They are the perfect stairs. It's the perfect stair-running space (minus many of the people). There's something holy and profound about it, and something deeply personal for me. It's like simultaneously running stairs in your own soul.

City Hall stairs feel repetitive. Tedious. Uneventful. Whereas, each day in the Monument feels like an event. Were things to ever work out, I understand that the Monument would loom large in my legend. As a boy, when I didn't even know what it was, and we were driving over a bridge near Boston en route to wherever we were going and I saw the Monument in the distance, I was drawn to it.

Not that I had any idea the role it'd play in my life, which has a huge amount to do with what has happened to me, both with Molly and publishing. All of the injustice, abuse, discrimination, and the resulting pain and suffering, the utter aloneness, the absence of any hope, living a life for years, for decades, that would have caused anyone else to end their life inside of a week. It's not like six-year-old me looking out that window knew what I was going to be in for. But I was still drawn to it. There was some other reason. Or maybe time bends back on itself and we don't know it.

But I still retain a fondness for the City Hall stairs. I've put a lot of sweat into them over the years. They are where you find me every Christmas morning--another day that I am all alone--in the darkness, trying to keep myself going. In the chance that someday...there's proof that there was reason to. But I don't think that day will ever come. I think I am here to suffer more than anyone ever has. Not for a larger reason, or so that anyone even ever knows. But almost like other forces want to see how much they can make someone hurt without breaking or ending their suffering by ending their life. The more I try, the better I become, in every regard--as an artist, a person, even with things like what I'm touching on in this entry--the worse it gets.

I haven't updated this little tally in over a month, so I should do so now lest I shortchange myself as I've done several times over the years, and let it thus be noted that this past Sunday marked 3374 days, or 482 weeks, without a drink of alcohol.

How do I feel about this? The few people I sometimes speak to take it for granted, being of the belief that I'm not human and can do anything when it comes to my mind/abilities and/or my strength/will. I guess that covers only things in my control. I can wake up and decide to write the best work of art ever made--that doesn't surprise such people--or I can elect to give up whatever it is I had done for a long time that is supposed to be very hard for anyone to give up and requires all of these steps, stages, and sources of outside help, and they think that because it's me that's easily enough done.

I don't look at drinking this way. I don't take it for granted and I don't take my not drinking for granted. I don't assume I won't. I try and make sure I don't. That would be the end. As I suggested above, I try to forestall the end, though if it's just going to be like this--or worse--I know there's no reason for me to be alive. I am aware of the contradictions. But miracles have happened. I know the world needs me and what I can do--as in, there's a great, gaping need for me and that--more than it has ever needed anything else.

That doesn't mean the ship carrying the medicine makes it through the storm and over the reefs to be distributed amongst the people on the land. It doesn't mean anyone there elects to take it if the shipment arrives. Even if eradication is the alternative. And here we're talking the eradication of humanness. There is also still time on that calendar.

Anyway, I have not had the drink, I am running my "back-up" stairs--and I have back-ups for my back-up, and, really, stairs squirreled away all over the area, on stunted side streets, in subway stations, on a hill in Brookline, and all the way out to Chestnut Hill--and now that the catching up is done, I'm going to work on a new story.